Circles of Power: An Introduction to Hermetic Magic: Third Edition

by John Michael Greer

Overview

An accessible and concise guide exploring the power and beauty of the Golden Dawn magical system. 

Take the Next Step...

Clear away the outdated clutter that has obscured the power and beauty of the Golden Dawn magical system and feel for yourself the difference these techniques can make in your life. Explore dozens of new rituals developed from the fragments and core documents of the greatest Magical Order in the Western world. Step out of the darkness and into the light of understanding.

John Michael Greer writes in a lucid and entertaining manner, revealing previously unknown aspects of the magical rites of the Golden Dawn. Warm and engaging, Circles of Power revitalizes Western magic by removing the unnecessary rhetoric and obscure jargon. Everything is plainly and simply explained and all the information you need to begin working within this magical system is presented in a clear and concise manner.

Filled with the fruits of personal experience and insights derived from in-depth research, Circles of Power is the next best thing to actually joining a Hermetic lodge.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781904658856
Publisher:	AEON BOOKS LTD
Publication date:	03/27/2017
Pages:	344
Sales rank:	413,515
Product dimensions:	5.90(w) x 8.90(h) x 1.00(d)

About the Author

One of the most widely respected voices in contemporary occult studies, John Michael Greer is the award-winning author of more than fifty books, including The New Encyclopedia of the Occult, The Druidry Handbook, The Celtic Golden Dawn, and Paths of Wisdom: Cabala in the Golden Dawn Tradition. An initiate in Freemasonry, the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, and the Order of Bards, Ovates and Druids, Greer served as the Grand Archdruid of the Ancient Order of Druids in America (AODA) for twelve years. He lives in Rhode Island with his wife Sara.

Read an Excerpt

Circles of Power

An Introduction to Hermetic Magic

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By JOHN MICHAEL GREER

Aeon Books Ltd

Copyright © 2017 John Michael Greer
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-904658-85-6

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CHAPTER 1

THE NATURE OF RITUAL MAGIC

The magical traditions of the world contain a dizzying array of different methods, practices and procedures. At first glance, there may seem to be very little in common between the pounding drums and bright colors of a Voudon ceremony under way in Haiti and the perfect meditative silence of an esoteric Buddhist magician at work in a temple in Japan, or, for that matter between either of these and the ornate working tools and flowing robes, stylized gestures and chanted words of power of a magician working in the Golden Dawn tradition. Still, despite the visible differences, a deeper thread of connection joins each of these practitioners and their work. That thread is the thread of ritual.

Even to those with no magical background at all, the idea of ritual is central to any notion of what magic is or what magicians do. To many modern Americans, whose closest approach to magical thought comes from caricatures in Saturday morning cartoons or the even sillier caricatures condemned from church pulpits on Sunday mornings, magic is still a matter of gestures and words, special objects and strange actions. This habit of thought is grounded in the realities of magic, for although there is more to magic than ritual; the art of ritual makes up the heart of magical technique in nearly all of the world's traditions.

We can define ritual as symbolic action. A symbol — this word opens up half the major issues of philosophy, but those will have to wait — is a thing that means something else; it defines a relationship, the relationship of meaning, between the symbol itself and the thing symbolized. A finger that points to the moon is not the same as the moon itself, but equally it is not the same as a finger which points to nothing at all. So, too, a symbol is neither the thing it symbolizes, nor simply the thing it is in itself. It has another dimension, the dimension of meaning, which exists in what (for now) we can call the realm or world of consciousness.

Human beings are symbolizing creatures; our languages, our social structures, the images and ideas which make up our understanding of the world, are all symbols; our perceptions of the world itself, as they filter through our senses, our brain structures, and our thought processes, are themselves nothing more than symbols of the reality outside us. If ritual is symbolic action, the great majority of all human activity is ritual — and this is in fact true, as a little time spent watching human beings will show.

Most of the time, of course, the rituals of everyday life go on in a habitual, half-conscious fashion. We talk without thinking about the abstract, symbolic nature of the links between sound and idea, and we shake hands without remembering that this gesture once proved that neither party had a weapon ready to use. Still, the subtle connections between symbol and meaning often remain in place, and shape human experience and behavior in a whole range of unexpected ways.

When ritual and the relationships of meaning which underlie it are studied and used deliberately, though, a whole range of possibilities opens up. These possibilities include most of the methods of magic. While the world's traditions of magic contain an enormous array of different tools, techniques and approaches, symbolism and symbolic action — that is, ritual — form the most important elements of the magician's toolkit. The mastery of ritual thus offers what is probably the single most important way to begin to make use of the immense hidden potentials of human consciousness, potentials that go far beyond the limits most people nowadays place on what it means to be human.

Models of Experience

In beginning the study of ritual magic, there is at least one major obstacle that has to be overcome before anything useful can be done. That obstacle is built out of some of the most basic elements of the modern way of thinking about the world. Unlike the students of magic in many non-Western cultures, who have grown up thinking in ways that include magic as a matter of course, the beginning magician in the modern West has been taught to perceive the world in ways that leave very little room for magic at all.

A good deal of ingenuity has been put over the last few centuries into the project of finding some way to wedge magic into the cracks and odd corners of the modern Western worldview. One popular approach to this project reinterprets magic as a kind of psychology, usually along the lines of Carl Jung's archetypal theories; another, once more popular than it is now, postulates some not-yet-discovered energy or substance as a medium for magical action. This kind of theorizing has a valid place. At the same time, there is much to be said for a different approach: learning to think about the world in another way — the magician's way.

In order to do this, it is necessary to remember that the models we use to understand the world are exactly that: models. They are maps of a reality, notthe reality itself. The model of scientific materialism is a very good map for understanding how physical matter and energy interact, but a very poor map for many other purposes. To use it as a basis for understanding magic, or for that matter much of the rest of life, is like trying to use a highway map to figure out topography or vegetation patterns. Nor is this simply a weakness in this one particular map; the universe of human experience is more complex than any single map, any one set of interpretations, can possibly be

It's also important, in beginning to think about the world of experience from the magician's viewpoint, to recognize that changing from one map to another can be a disquieting experience, sometimes a deeply disturbing one. Much of the appeal of the various extreme belief systems currently being marketed as absolute truth in our society comes from this fact. Faced with the stark vision of a universe no map can contain — a universe which is, in its fullness, incomprehensible to the human mind — it can be all too easy to flee into some comforting belief system that promises certainty, whether that system be the abstract materialism of modern science or the arbitrary commandments of some religious dogma. Ultimately, though, the promise of certainty is a lie, and one that lessens those who embrace it.

In the same way, the model of the world we will be examining here is simply a model, applicable to certain areas of human experience and less applicable to others. It is not itself the truth, in any real sense, and to take it as such is to waste most of its potential. Similarly, the wide range of things and beings which play a role in that model — levels of being and modes of action, elements and worlds, Spheres and Paths, spirits and angels and Names of Power — are no more real than, say, electrons or the Gross National Product; they are simply ways of speaking about subtle aspects of the universe we experience each day. This, in turn, is their strength, for whether they exist or not, as Aleister Crowley was fond of pointing out, the universe does indeed appear to work as if they do.

With these points in mind, then, we can begin to venture across the debatable lands separating the familiar countryside of our culture's current image of the world from the forbidden realms where magic has its home. In doing so, we will be straying onto ground which the founders and adepts of the Golden Dawn itself rarely touched. The excellence of the Golden Dawn system is in its practical methods; the theory and philosophy of magic behind these methods was rarely discussed in the Order, and few of the successor groups have much to offer in this field. It's in the traditions of magic from which the Golden Dawn arose — traditions reaching back through the great magical revival of the Renaissance into ancient times — that the meaning and context of magical practice can be found.

One way to explore the model of the world that underlies Golden Dawn magic, then, would involve a journey through the work of Cabalistic, Hermetic and Neoplatonic philosophers and mystics. This could easily fill up a book by itself, though, and much of what would be covered has little direct relevance to the practice of ritual magic. Fortunately, it is possible to approach the magical model of the universe by a different route: one that begins not from ancient traditions or systems of thought, but from the simple realities of the way that we experience the universe at each moment.

The Worlds We Perceive

One of the most important parts of the map of the universe that dominates modern Western culture is the idea that the "real world" is made up entirely of matter and energy, while consciousness is simply an odd phenomenon that goes on inside certain lumps of meat called human brains. This notion, which seems like plain common sense to most modern people, actually rises from a highly arbitrary set of beliefs about the universe; it has to be taught, and it makes sense only if some quite common aspects of human experience are ignored.

We will need to leave behind, for a moment, the usual assumptions about what is "real" and what is not, and start from a more basic question. What kinds of perceptions do human beings have about this complicated thing we call the universe? What, at the most basic level, do we perceive?

First of all, there is a set of perceptions that appear to come into consciousness through the senses of sight, hearing, taste, touch, and smell. These are the things which modern thought classifies as information about the "real world."

Second, there are a set of perceptions, hard to discuss in modern English but highly familiar to members of many other cultures, which seem to come through subtle forms of the ordinary senses. If you shake your hands thoroughly, then cup them before you as if you were holding a ball and, while breathing slowly and deeply, move your hands gently closer and farther apart from each other, you are likely to perceive one example of this kind of experience. These perceptions seem to be closely related to those of the material senses in certain ways, for many of the things perceived by these more elusive senses — though not all — are related to things in the realm of physical experience; a given object, a particular place, a certain person will tend to have a consistent "feel" or "energy" just as they have a consistent physical appearance.

Third, there are a set of perceptions which take more or less sensory forms — spoken or written words, images, and so on — but which seem to be independent of the world perceived by the senses. These perceptions go on more or less constantly, as a kind of running monologue in awareness. Our modern way of looking at the world classifies these perceptions as thoughts, feelings, memories, daydreams, and so on.

Fourth, there is a set of perceptions that do not take sensory forms, are independent of the world the senses perceive, and yet seem to have a role in structuring that world. These might best be described as perceptions of pattern — for example, the perception that things that are equal to the same thing are equal to each other. What modern thought calls the laws of logic, mathematics, and — to some extent — nature are included in this category.

Fifth and finally, there is a set of perceptions of the kind that are sometimes called "mystical." These are completely independent of the senses or sensory forms, or for that matter of the patterns of any of the previous kinds of experience; they seem to involve perception of the universe as a unity, and of the individual self in relation to that unity.

It is possible to divide up the spectrum of possible human experience in other ways, of course, but this fivefold division offers a useful perspective on the modern "common sense" mentioned above. In the terms we've just explored, the modern way of thinking takes one of these kinds of experience — the kind which comes through the senses — and sets it up as the only "real" kind, claiming that it reflects a "real" world of matter and energy, and dismissing all other kinds of experience as nothing more than by-products of this world.

Logically speaking, this is hard to justify. It's been claimed that the world of sensory experience is real because it is objective — that is, experienced the same way by different people — while all other kinds of experience are subjective — experienced differently by different people. Common though the claim is, this simply isn't true. First of all, there are plenty of experiences of the nonsensory kinds which are as "objective" as anything material can be: the basic rules of mathematics, to give only one obvious example, are the same no matter who uses them, and the effectiveness of many martial arts depends on the concrete reality of experiences of the second kind we've examined above. Nor are all physical experiences necessarily perceived in the same way by everyone involved; the taste of a particular wine or the events of a traffic accident are likely to be perceived and described by different people in very different ways.

It has been claimed, many times, that this last factor simply represents inaccurate human perceptions of an objective fact. This argument might have some merit, except for the awkward point that these same inaccurate perceptions are the only evidence there is that the supposed "objective fact" exists at all. Human perception is the only thing we can actually know. The realm of "objective fact" is no more than a mental construct, pieced together in our minds out of certain kinds of human experience according to certain fairly arbitrary rules. The only world we can know directly at all is the world of human perception, of human consciousness, and everything else comes to us only as shadows cast into this world.

It is reasonable to assume, though it can't be proved logically, that some of these shadows are cast by something outside of human consciousness. It is reasonable, too, to create mental models of that "something outside," and to treat these models as rough representations of a universe in which we exist. It is not reasonable, on the other hand, to dismiss most kinds of human experience as possible evidence on which such models can be based, and to use only one narrow set of perceptions to judge all of the others — but this is precisely what the modern notion of reality does.

Levels of Experience

The traditions of Western magic, drawing from an older way of looking at the universe, have always taken a broader view. In the magical philosophy of the Cabala, on which Golden Dawn magic is based, the universe around us is seen as a continuum that reaches from spirit to matter without a break, passing through every level of human experience in between. The most important model for this continuum is the diagram of the Tree of Life, which describes it in terms of ten fundamental stages or levels of existence. For our present purposes, though, a different model may be more useful, one based on the same fivefold division of experience we examined above. This model can be pictured as a pair of intersecting triangles, one representing matter, the other spirit, as shown in Diagram 1-1.

The realms of intersection between matter and spirit can be divided into five levels, and these in turn can be related to the five elements of traditional magical symbolism, which we will be exploring in more detail later. These levels are as follows:

1 Physical. The physical level is experienced through the five ordinary senses. It can be seen in terms of physical matter and energy, more or less as these are understood by modern scientific thought. Older traditions describe it as made by the interactions of four elements — fire, air, water, earth — which correspond to the modern concepts of energy, gases, liquids and solids. Symbolically, this level corresponds to the solid and unyielding element of Earth.

2 Etheric. The etheric level is experienced through a different set of senses, more or less paralleling ordinary sight and touch. It can be thought of as a level of immaterial substance, which shares some qualities with both energy and matter, but which is closely connected to biological life. This "ether," as it is sometimes called, can be identified with the prana of Hindu yoga or the ch'i or ki of East Asian martial arts. In magical philosophy, it is seen as the underlying basis of the material level, an ocean of subtle substance providing patterns along which matter and energy take shape. Symbolically, it corresponds to the fluid and receptive element of Water.

3 Astral. The astral level, or level of concrete consciousness, is experienced through what we normally think of as the mind — that is, the faculties of intellect, emotion, imagination, will and memory. It's important to understand that, from the magician's perspective, these can function as senses and instruments of action, and neither of these functions are limited to the inside of any one person's head. The astral level can be thought of as a realm of flowing energies linking mind to mind, moving through ever-changing patterns which appear to our awareness as thoughts, feelings, images and the like, and which are shaped by our own consciousness and that of others. Symbolically, this level corresponds to the energetic and transforming element of Fire.

(Continues...)

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Excerpted from Circles of Power by JOHN MICHAEL GREER. Copyright © 2017 John Michael Greer. Excerpted by permission of Aeon Books Ltd.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.

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Table of Contents

Foreword to the New Edition 1

Foreword to the Original Edition: Ritual Magic in the Hermetic Tradition 3

Part I Principles of Ritual Magic 7

Chapter 1 The Nature of Ritual Magic 9

Chapter 2 The Magical Macrocosm 23

Chapter 3 The Magical Microcosm 45

Chapter 4 The Tools of Ritual Magic 63

Chapter 5 The Practice of Ritual Magic 103

Part II Practice of Ritual Magic 123

Chapter 6 Foundations of Ritual: Invoking and Banishing 125

Chapter 7 Foundations of Ritual: The Middle Pillar Exercises 143

Chapter 8 Foundations of Ritual: Opening and Closing 155

Chapter 9 Applications of Ritual: Working Tools 173

Chapter 10 Applications of Ritual: Talismans 197

Chapter 11 Applications of Ritual: Evocation 215

Chapter 12 Applications of Ritual: Invisibility and Transformation 230

Chapter 13 Applications of Ritual: Spiritual Development 259

Chapter 14 The Formula of the Equinox 279

Appendix: Cabalistic Symbolism 307

Bibliography 323

Index 327

Editorial Reviews

An accessible and concise guide exploring the power and beauty of the Golden Dawn magical system.

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